This Opera Hasn't Even Opened,
But We Know It Smells

French Perfume Designer Makes Scents
to Go With the Music of 'Green Aria'

By

Alexandra Alter

Updated May 20, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Most high-end perfumers spend months designing a signature scent they hope will stay on the market forever.

Christophe Laudamiel, who wants to turn fragrance into high art, has labored for two years on 23 scents that will last for just half an hour.

Mr. Laudamiel, a French fragrance designer who has created perfumes for Clinique, Est&eacute;e Lauder, Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors, is collaborating on a "scent opera," a new performance art that pairs music with a carefully orchestrated sequence of smells, some pleasant and some real stinkers. The opera, titled "Green Aria," will test the boundaries of scent art when it opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York May 31.

ENLARGE

Christophe Laudamiel
Olivia Jezler

"Perfumery should be the same kind of discipline as music or visual art," says Mr. Laudamiel, an energetic 40-year-old who sports a mohawk, gem-studded belt and gold sneakers -- and who refers to scents as characters. "You need that nurturing of crazy ideas."

The scent opera may be Mr. Laudamiel's most ambitious undertaking. In a darkened theater, audiences will be bombarded with smells, blasted in six-second sequences by a scent "microphone" attached to each seat. The scents tell the story of an epic struggle between nature and industry. Nearly five years in the making, the opera was conceived by Stewart Matthew, a corporate financier turned entrepreneur who co-founded Aeosphere, a "fragrance media" company, with Mr. Laudamiel in 2008.

"I thought it was insane," says Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson, who paired up with another composer, Nico Muhly, to create music based on the scents.

Thierry Mugler, the fashion, fragrance and design house, is sponsoring the opera. Mr. Matthew wrote the English libretto and is directing the opera.

More is at stake than novelty and artistic success. Messrs. Matthew and Laudamiel are marketing their new scent technology to hotels, movie theaters, videogame makers and other entertainment companies that want to pack a bigger sensory punch.

"I have stage fright," Mr. Laudamiel confided to another perfumer at a fragrance lab in Plainsboro, N.J. One afternoon recently, Mr. Laudamiel was working there at the U.S. headquarters of the Swiss flavor and fragrance company Firmenich, his temporary home until Aeosphere opens its Manhattan office next month. With just three weeks left, he was tweaking his scent formulas to better fit the final musical score.

The cast of characters lined the windowsill, stashed in small, brown apothecary bottles. Some consist of more than 100 different molecules. The "Magma" scent smelled like hot tar, an effect Mr. Laudamiel achieved with a molecule called limbanol. "Crunchy green" has a fresh, watery green smell, a property of the molecule cis-3-Hexenyl isobutyrate. Another "green" character, which smells overripe and leathery, contains hyraceum absolute, an extract made from the feces of the rock hyrax, a small African mammal.

'Bit Too Earthy'

Others still needed work. Mr. Laudamiel sniffed a bottle labeled "shiny steel," which smelled sharp, sweet and cold, and shook his head. "It came out a bit too earthy. It should be more brilliant, and less dark in the back," he said.

"Earth," which smelled moist and musky, with hints of moss, beet and patchouli, needed to smell dirtier, he concluded. "The floral part, it makes it too pretty." He pulled out another bottle labeled "Fire." It smelled intensely smoky, and a bit sweet, the way clothes smell after a night around a campfire. "At one point it smelled like baked bread," he said.

'Close That Bottle'

His partner and longtime collaborator puckered his face. "Can you close that bottle?" the perfumer, Christoph Hornetz, said without lifting his eyes from his laptop.

Mr. Laudamiel obliged, and dashed off to the storeroom to find the perfect cedar scent. Among thousands of alphabetized bottles, he found six different cedar woods, and began sniffing. One smelled like pencil shavings, another woody and dark, another herbal.

"No, that's too camphorous," he said, moving to the next bottle. He crouched and opened a bottle of methyl furfural, a molecule that smells like caramel, with hints of leather and black cherry. "I like that. I'm going to double it," he said.

Chemists and perfumers in white lab coats and blue gloves drifted in and out, plucking ingredients from shelves and refrigerators. The vilest odors sat in a fridge labeled "Stench List." Cracking the refrigerator set loose a noxious cloud, a mix of vomit, feces, urine, rotten fish and burning trash. The stenches are as essential to perfumers' palate as rose and citrus scents, Mr. Laudamiel said.

Neuroscientists and biologists are still puzzled by the mysteries of how we perceive smells. The human nose has about 350 to 400 different kinds of functional receptors, compared with just four types of receptors in the eyes. Smell triggers electrical signals that travel to the brain's olfactory bulb and limbic system, which governs emotion and memory.

The emotional power of smell holds tantalizing commercial possibilities. Theme parks, casinos, stores and hotel chains have experimented with ambient scents for decades. Yet efforts to add elaborate "scent tracks" to movies, dating back to the 1940s and 1950s, have failed. A series of ill-fated scent devices, with names like AromaRama, Odorama and Smell-O-Vision, bombed with moviegoers, suggesting audiences may prefer their entertainment unscented.

"You'd get this cacophony of smells," says Terry Molnar, executive director of the Sense of Smell Institute in New York. "Before you know it, there was this sickening, horrible stench."

Aside from the artistic challenges of melding music and scent, the scent opera faces serious technical hurdles. One issue is overload as scents pile up, creating a smelly fog. Timing can also be tricky. Unlike images and sounds, which hit our sense organs almost instantly, scent molecules travel slowly through the air, often taking as much as a minute to get to the back row of a theater.

To overcome these obstacles, Mr. Laudamiel and Mr. Stewart turned to Fl&auml;kt Woods, a global ventilation company. It designed a box that holds pressurized steel canisters, each containing scented crystals with different odors. Crystals produce a smell that evaporates more quickly than liquids or oils. Computer-operated valves force compressed air through the canisters to release a sequence of scents, which flow from the box through plastic tubes and eventually waft out of the scent microphones attached to each seat. Periodically, the microphones will release a gust of unscented air to clear the nasal passages.

Sensory Limits

Even scent-art enthusiasts doubt that fragrance can claim a place alongside painting, sculpture and music. Robert Blackson, curator at Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, says that marketing scent art can be tricky: Smells can't be digitized, or featured in catalogs and on the Web. Others warn that the nose can't handle all the stimulation.

"The nose is a very sensitive organ which cannot take more than a certain amount of impressions," says Jo&euml;l Palix, president of Clarins Fragrance Group and Thierry Mugler.

Mr. Matthew argues that audiences have a much higher tolerance for scent than industry experts claim, a theory that will be tested by his "Green Aria." "The real challenge is, how do you give a scent meaning?" he says.

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